The Legend of Zelda: Ancestral Origins
by allen.bair
Summary: 10,000 years ago, a group of scientists from Atlantis opened a portal to a world unlike any other and began a chain of events which would spawn the cycle of an ageless conflict to keep that world in balance. Power, Wisdom, and Courage are needed to forge the fate of the world they called "Hyrule." This is the origin story of all of my LoZ/Stargate/LOTR/Warcraft crossovers.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The day was sunny and warm. The air smelled of the salt of the seemingly endless Lantean ocean which surrounded the ancient, star shaped city floating upon its waters. Men, women and several children in light but modest clothing of various colors and styles could be seen milling about the metallic gray east pier. Some strolled, talking and laughing at some private or not so private joke, while others sat quietly in cross legged positions, either by themselves or in a group, meditating and centering themselves in the pursuit of their final ascension, when they would be able to shed their mortal flesh and ascend to a higher plane of existence as beings of pure energy.

With a war raging among the stars above them against a seemingly unstoppable enemy, it had been a long, difficult week for everyone in the elegantly designed but functional city. All needed the time to recover from the continuous stream of bad news that kept flowing in.

There were scientists and researchers, administrators, and technicians taking the time to de-stress and re-center themselves. There were off duty security officers, and soldiers on leave as well. Many of these latter wore haunted looks in their eyes and stood quietly at various railings watching the horizon.

Constructed more than a million years before as one of the great city-ships of their people, Atlantis served as capital city, research base, and home to the race of advanced humans who now called themselves Lanteans. Originating in a distant galaxy far across the universe millions of years before, and traveling from galaxy to galaxy learning and seeding habitable worlds with intelligent life, their own ancestors had founded their semi-nomadic civilization on the guiding principles of peaceful scientific research and non-interference with less advanced peoples.

The fifty or so square kilometers of advanced technology and architecture were laid out like a snowflake with six broad spokes projecting from a center platform. Those radiating platforms became piers which held high towers for research, manufacturing, and residences, as well as platforms for landed spacecraft. The main central tower rose high like a spire towards the heavens watching over the goings on of all those under its care. Its stained glass windows and elegant ornamentation caught the rays of the sun brilliantly. Other high rises and towers of the city stood compacted around it like protective subordinates, accentuating its dominating presence.

Their own mothers busy with preparations for relocation, two children, a boy and a girl, both ten years old or so (though the girl took pride in being five months older than the boy), sat on the lower part of the dock watching the water. They were looking for the great pods of cetaceans that migrated past the city's location at that time of year. Trying to find something to do while their parents packed, they had talked about trying to fish that day, or playing hide and seek in the building where their mothers had been sharing apartments next to each other, but neither could work up the energy to actually _do_ it.

And it was such a nice day.

The girl had long, golden blond hair and royal blue eyes. Her skin was fair, but she didn't burn in the tropical sun like one might expect. She wore a long white, sleeveless summer dress with a golden belt that her mother had procured for her while doing research off world through the stargate_,_ the great circular ring that opened gateways to other worlds. Her diminutive feet were shod with light golden sandals which complemented the belt.

The boy she sat next to had been her next door neighbor for as long as she could remember. He had reddish blond hair and an impish grin. His own eyes were forest green like his mother's. He had lost all the baby fat of his early childhood, and was beginning to sport broad shoulders and the promise of a slender but athletic build. He went shirtless and barefoot that day, wearing only a pair of gray trousers and a belt.

"So, what do you think, Hylia?" He asked.

"About what, Copulus?" She answered, looking at the waves beneath, hoping to catch a glimpse of the marine life.

Before her mother, Nayru, started her research on the link between belief and the power it gave ascended beings, she had been a marine biologist and oceanologist studying Lantea's vast marine ecosystem. That had been before Hylia had been born, but she had shared her love with and early fascination of the sea with her daughter. She could name all the species local to the region around the city.

"What do you think Terra is like?" He asked again.

"Mother says it's a lot like Lantea, except there are seven continents instead of just one." She answered. "That means there isn't as much ocean." She said disapprovingly. "There's only one moon like here, but we'll probably never see it."

"Yeah, I know. My mother said the same thing, but I mean, what do you think it's like? Do you think it'll be fun?" He asked again, trying to imagine it. "She says there are a lot of different kinds of animals and ecosystems there; lots of forests, deserts, grasslands. Do you think we'll see any of it?"

"My mother says that we're going to travel to the southern polar region first. That's where the stargate is there. She says it's a frozen desert. From there we're supposed to go to a base in an underground cave underneath a big desert volcano." Her voice became a little sadder as she talked matter of factly. "We won't be near the ocean at all. We'll just be stuck in a big cave for the rest of our lives."

"No, we won't. My mother said it was just until they could finish researching stuff. When they're ready, we'll all come back." Copulus tried to reassure her.

"That could take years. I might be old and wrinkly by the time that happens." Hylia responded, a bit of resentment in her voice.

"Well, I'm not going to wait until that happens. When I'm old enough, I'll become a security officer just like my father was, and I'll help keep the Wraith away from us." He told her.

Copulus's father, Silvus, had been a security officer on board the Lantean battlecruiser _Vagantor_ which had been lost in combat with the alien predatory race two years before. There had been no survivors that Atlantis Command knew of.

The Wraith were a humanoid species that had evolved within their Galaxy largely though a gross mistake on the part of the Lantean scientists and researchers. They originated from an insectoid species called _Iratus_ which fed on the life force of other creatures. What those scientists who initially studied them didn't realize is that they also assimilated small amounts of DNA from their victims. When the Atlanteans began populating the worlds of the new galaxy in which they found themselves a million years prior, the Iratus insectoids started feeding off of the newly formed human populations as well.

Over a million years of assimilation, the Iratus insectoids took on so much human DNA that they became mostly human in appearance, though pale, almost bluish white in coloring with razor sharp teeth and reptilian eyes. They were also telepathic in nature. These humanoids quickly developed their own technologies and form of hive based civilization and eventually became space faring, seeking out new feeding grounds with large populations of human beings.

The Atlanteans then moved to counter the new threats by destroying the great Wraith hive ships in space wherever they found them, but somehow there were always more. And it seemed more worlds were attacked and "culled" every day. Over the last several years, more and more hive ships were encountered and the Atlanteans found themselves facing more and more overwhelming odds with each encounter. More Atlantis warships were lost as the war against the alien race went on.

"But that means you'll have to come back here." Hylia responded after a minute's pause. "And then I'll be stuck in a big cave by myself."

"No you won't. I'll come back for you and we can both live and work here instead of Terra." Copulus told her. "And then you could watch the fish all you wanted."

"You really would?" She asked him, turning her head to look at him, her voice laced with a real hope.

"You're my best friend, Hylia. I'd never leave you alone forever." The boy reassured her, turning his own head to meet her eyes.

For whatever reason, the boy's words struck Hylia in a way they hadn't before. Copulus _had_ always been her best friend, as far back as she could remember. The truth was, she couldn't imagine her life without him in it. Who would play with her if he wasn't there? Who would listen to her talk about the most recent sea animal she had discovered? And what would happen to him without her? Who would make him study his lessons for school? Who would get him out of bed on days like this when Farore was busy with her work?

"You'd better not." She said, and then punched him hard in the arm, then giggled.

"Ow! Hylia!" He yelped, rubbing the newly forming bruise on his bare arm. "What was that for?"

"Just because." She answered lightly, the twinge of a smile creeping on the corners of her mouth.

"Girls." Copulus muttered under his breath.

He would never understand them.

Nayru stood in her somewhat austere gray, red, and copper accentuated laboratory, going over a list for the second time, studying the screen of her thin tablet computer. There was so much equipment which had to be cataloged and then packed away for transport through the stargate that she kept feeling like she was missing something even though it looked right.

Her long blond hair, lightly highlighted with barely noticeable streaks of silver, was tied back into a functional, somewhat girlish ponytail. Her royal blue eyes, with only the barest hints of crow's feet at their corners, were fixed on the hand held computer's crystal display. They were reading the blocky text on the screen over and over again trying to make sure nothing went wrong with the extremely sensitive equipment during gate travel. Quantum teleportation and wormhole travel, while reliable and mostly safe, could play havoc with the quantum states of unstable matter particles, such as the ones which were key components of the equipment her team's research depended on.

She wore a light tan and white short sleeve shirt and gray trousers as she went through comparing packing numbers to the list in front of her. As she did, she hummed a few bars of an old tune, a lullaby she had been taught as a child. Why it should come to her mind now of all times, she didn't know but it wouldn't stop playing in her head.

That reminded her of her beloved "harp". It was really more of a hand lyre. It had been fashioned by a particularly musical people off world from a strong yet pliable golden material. It sported bird like decorations and engravings. Those same people had taught her to play it, and the first song she attempted had been that child's lullaby because it was the simplest tune she knew. When her daughter Hylia had turned five, she began to teach her to play it too. It still sat next to her bedside waiting to be packed along with the rest of their personal effects.

They had some time, at least a week, before they had to pack up their small apartment. The equipment was the priority at the moment. It would be sent on through the gate first to the antarctic base, and then on to Duo'oni by gateship. Fidela, a lithe young woman who was masterful with the computer systems and artificial intelligence programming would be going with the equipment to see that it was properly installed and ready for the arrival of the rest of their team.

The truth was, Nayru had mixed feelings about leaving the city she had called home since she herself was a little girl. She and her daughter, the only blood family she still had after Hylia's father left them for a settlement on the other side of the galaxy, would be leaving the comforts of real civilization and technology for the rustic, uncomfortable living of an off world researcher.

The new research base was in a huge natural cavern underground, far away from the nascent human populations that had surprised the initial surveyors and scouts who reopened Terra's stargate. Most of those scattered bands of hunter gatherers, in a way distant cousins to the Lanteans, were located in the continents on the eastern hemisphere of the world, though a few small groups of nomads roamed the forests in the north of the northwestern continent. It would be criminal for the Lanteans to introduce themselves and their technologies to such a primitive people. It would interfere in their natural development irreparably. They might be seen as powerful sorcerers or worse, deities, and that was unacceptable for any reason.

This was the main reason for the somewhat unusual location of this research base. Other Lantean settlements had been established as well in discreet locations around Terra's diverse landscape as more of their people chose to relocate to their ancient, ancestral planet for various reasons. Several had been established on high mountains where none of the more recent humans would dare to go.

But it also meant they wouldn't see the sun on a regular basis. Or the ocean. She had been told there was a large underground lake in the cavern, but that wouldn't be the same as feeling the salty air on her skin, or watching the waves with her daughter and the boy who was Hylia's constant companion.

As she thought about all the things she loved that would no longer be within her reach, for the third time that day, she wrestled with the reasons why the three project leaders—Din, Farore, and herself—had agreed to move their families and laboratory. One name came to mind which had all but decided it, _Mor__o__s_. The leader of the Atlantean High Council was constantly looking over their shoulders, criticizing and questioning the validity of their data. As a result, they could accomplish little. And their lack of results only provided fuel to his arguments. No, they had to go elsewhere.

It was Din who had first suggested the course of research to her. They had been friends and colleagues along with Farore since they had all been educated together. Din was a brilliant physicist and engineer, while Farore's field of study lay in genetics, biology, and ecosystems. Initially fascinated by marine life and especially intelligent cetacean life, Nayru herself was a student of the inner workings of the brain. They had come to rely on the balance of each other's specializations for the demands which their research had placed on them, as they all looked at the problem through the lens of their own field of study and then applied it to each other's insights.

It had long been known that the faith a mortal being placed in an ascended being could somehow provide a transfer of power to that ascended being. However, no one but those who had ascended really understood why, or what physical process was at work.

As more and more of her people learned to ascend on their own, Din had brought up the point of discussion about what might happen should one of their own ascended people masquerade as a deity and demand worship. This could potentially imbalance that ascended being's power against the others who would normally police them.

The goal of their research was to understand this link between one's belief in something and the reality that belief generated. They knew that the key to it lay in the simple physics of quantum states, that one's expectation of a result influenced, even if only slightly, the result given. They had spent the last decade building their team and designing the equipment meant to study the related phenomena.

But Morlis disapproved of their goal strongly, and vocally.

"Let the ascended police their own, and we will do the same. We have no more right to interfere with their existence than they do with ours." This had been Moros' constant argument.

This disapproval had been a mild annoyance up until the last year or so. And then Moros had been elected to preside over the High Council, and life became doubly difficult for any scientist whose experiments and research didn't adhere to Moros' personal philosophies. Almost overnight poor Janus, a brilliant scientist they had collaborated with at times, moved his own laboratory to a location within the city only he knew of or had access to just to get away from Moros' prying.

Nayru and her team had no such option anymore within the city. But still, she would miss her home enclosed, as it were, deep within the bowels of the new planet. At least they wouldn't be completely alone and without familiar faces.

Besides herself and her daughter, there would be Farore and her son, Copulus as well. Din and her father, Sargeras would be there. Sargeras was a retired general who had distinguished himself over his many years of service, earning the somewhat infamous nickname of "Demise" for the way he could turn the tide of a battle. He was now taking a quiet posting as head of security at the Duo'oni site to remain in close contact with his daughters. Then of course there would be Fidela, Din's younger sister. "Fi" was the junior member of their team at the tender age of nineteen, but she was absolutely brilliant in coming up with the computer models and the A.I. programming that their instruments relied on. She was also indispensable as a surrogate older sister for her ten year old Hylia.

She went through her checklist several more times, and then finally, as she surveyed the packed, obsidian black containers, she realized that there was nothing more she need do until the next day. Her laboratory seemed empty now. There were only a couple of computer consoles left on lonely, copper colored tables with black crystal monitors above them, now dark.

The empty laboratory would remain in Nayru's possession for private research space even though away. Either she or one of the others would invariably have to return to Atlantis at some point to upload their ongoing research into the city's database for future generations, and they would need a private place to do it.

With nothing left to do, she moved towards the door and, as she passed her hand over the sensor, the door slid open allowing her to leave. It was getting to be evening, and she had promised Hylia that they would eat their meal together with Farore and her son.

Sargeras stood at the railing of the deck to his apartment, hands closed around the metal of it, looking up at Lantea's moon as it began its ascent into the night sky, dominating the other smaller celestial lights around it with its pale, silvery illumination. It was a beautiful sight, and one he wanted to enjoy for as long as he could. As he understood it, his new home with his daughters would have few simple pleasures such as these.

He had spent a great deal of his life in that night sky among the stars which now twinkled in the darkness above him. Over forty years on warships putting down the ever increasing threat which the vampiric Wraith posed. In those forty years, he rarely had the time or inclination to really appreciate the beauty of the stars around him, or above him when he was planetside.

His once flame colored orangish red hair and mustache was now almost completely filled with silver. The worries and cares his previous position had brought him had taken its toll in the permanent bags under his eyes, and lines across his face. He had been responsible for the lives of hundreds on board the ships he commanded, and millions of lesser developed humans on the planets which the Wraith intended as feeding grounds. Most he had been able to preserve, but not all. Such were the realities of war.

He had stopped wearing the uniform of Atlantis's military months ago. It had been time to turn over the fight to the younger men and women. But once he had done so, the nightmares began to invade his sleep. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months he felt an emptiness gnawing at his insides as he spent his retirement reading, writing his memoirs, and trying to occupy himself with anything he could.

It nearly drove him to insanity.

The Wraith were still out there, but there had been little he could do to stop their advance. He had won every engagement he had taken ships into, but they kept on coming. They were like demons from some mythological nether region that kept spawning more and more no matter how many hive ships he destroyed.

Every day, more human worlds were culled by them. This was bad enough. It was like watching your favorite pets get eaten by the local bully. Sargeras didn't feel as strongly about them as he felt he probably should have, but all of those human populations had essentially been created in a lab by his own people hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were human, but they weren't Lantean. None of them were advanced enough to ascend on their own like most of his own people could. It would take millennia more of evolution to achieve that.

But the Wraith devastated Lantea's own settled worlds and colonies as well, murdering hundreds of thousands of Lanteans. In his military career he had seen no less than thirteen Lantean colonies culled, their few handfuls of survivors taking refuge through the stargate back to Lantea where they hoped to find safety. And he had barely just slowed them down.

He wouldn't admit this to anyone, but this was the real reason he was standing on the deck of his apartment in the city looking up at the moon. He retired because one day he had woken up in his quarters aboard his flagship and realized that the fight was an exercise in futility. It wasn't a matter of "if" they expanded their territory enough to overrun the Lantean forces, but "when". It may be decades, but they would reach Lantea itself, and there would be nothing his people would be able to do to stop them.

This was the lesson he had taken away from the war against the Wraith.

He was powerless.

Sargeras closed his eyes and took a deep breath to clear the negative thoughts from his mind. He focused on his breathing for several minutes before he opened them again.

_Release your burdens_. He told himself internally. _It can't be your responsibility forever._

This was really the whole point of his relocating to Terra with his daughters, he reminded himself. _I'm not getting any younger, and no one lives in their mortal flesh forever. _

He needed to let go of the war. He needed to let go and focus on his own path to ascension. He had allowed his own meditation exercises to lapse severely during his career, and now, who knew how much time he had left? He couldn't afford to allow himself to think of what might have been, or what might be. There was only the moment, right here and right now.

He looked up at the moon again. It had risen higher in the sky as it shone down on the Lantean ocean's waters. He allowed its silvery light to fill him with a moment's peace and forget, even if only briefly.

The great ring of the stargate stood quiet the next morning, its constellation symbols marking destination coordinates glowed faintly with a blue light signifying its "standby" status. Behind it, the golden orange light of morning shone gently through the artistically segmented window. In front of it lay the mostly empty, cathedral like chamber which oversaw all comings and goings to and from the city through the device.

The chamber sat just below the control room for the entire city. Elegant stairs inscribed with messages of welcome in the Lantean language stood opposing the gate. They climbed towards a large stained glass window, their path split off towards a conference room on the left and the command and control room on the right.

Containers of equipment sat on the red tiled floor nearby waiting to be transferred through the stargate. A young, lithe woman stood nearby them, checking their seals to ensure they would survive the brief exposure to the extreme cold of polar weather they would experience, and then the potentially longer exposure to intense desert heat. There was still the concern over the effect dematerialization would have on the quantum states of the experimental modules, but it couldn't be helped. With all of Atlantis's hyperdrive capable spacecraft occupied with the war, there was really no other efficient way to transport them into the next galaxy over.

The young woman had shoulder length, flame colored hair which fell in an attractive manner to either side of her face, and slightly bronzed skin, although it might have been darker had she not spent so much time locked away in a room at a computer console. She wore a white fabric dress with tan and gold highlights. The material it was made of was designed to insulate her from the extremes in temperature she knew she would face over the course of the rest of her day. Her tan colored, shin length boots were made of a similar material.

"Almost ready, Fi?" A friendly voice asked from behind her.

Fidela stood up from where she had been crouching and turned around to see another woman, fifteen years her senior. Like the computer specialist, the woman had flame colored, orange red hair, though hers flowed down her back in a long, but more practical ponytail. Unlike her sister, the older woman wore a white lab tunic over light tan colored pants.

"Din!" The younger woman responded. "I didn't expect to see you here this morning! I thought you were helping father pack today."

"I will." Din responded, putting her hands on Fidela's shoulders then drawing her into a warm embrace. "But later. I didn't want my little sister to go without at least seeing her off first."

Fi smiled broadly, returning the embrace. She held her sister tightly for just over a minute before she let go.

"Thanks." She replied. "It looks like everything's ready to go." Fi looked back towards the box like containers with small digital readouts of the condition of their contents.

"And are you?" Din asked, looking at her sister with some concern.

Fi looked back to Din, "What? Oh, yes… yes, I'll be fine. It's just a trip through the stargate. People do it all the time."

"True, but this is your first, isn't it?" Din asked.

"Well, yes. But I'm sure I'll be fine." Fi responded, somewhat unconvincingly. Then after an awkward silence she asked, "You've gone off world before, Din. What is it like?"

"The stargate? It's almost instantaneous, like walking through a doorway from one room to the next. The most trouble you'll have is a little nausea and disorientation, but that clears up almost immediately." Din replied.

Fi nodded and tried to smile, though her expression still seemed less than convinced.

"I wish you were coming with me." She told her sister, her smile fading.

"I am, Fi. We are all going to be right behind you. Just one more week." Din reassured her. "And Gaius will be waiting to receive you right on the other side of the gate. I've asked that he keep you company on the way to Duo'oni and help you settle in."

"You didn't! Din!" Fidela practically yelped at her sister, her eyes wide with horror at the prospect.

Gaius had been a classmate of Fidela's before he entered the security service, and one upon whom the younger daughter of Sargeras had a crush for some time though she never expressed it. Instead, she buried herself in her algorithms and coding trying to escape it.

Fi had always been more comfortable with computers than with organic, breathing people. As a child, she had always had a way with numbers and seeing them differently. Whereas others of her age might have seen zero through seven and the various operations with which one could make use of them tedious or even needless, she saw them as friends and comforting companions. She always knew where she stood with the logic of numbers, and later with the calculations demanded by programming. It was interacting with people, and the illogical emotions which those interactions brought with them that confused and even frightened her a little.

Din giggled girlishly at her sister's reaction. "He's going to be working with us on Terra anyway as one of father's men." She said in her defense, still smiling. "He went through a few days ago with the other security personnel. I asked him to look out for you before he went, and he said he'd stay back a few days and wait for you to arrive. I didn't want you to be alone there."

"But… but..." Fi responded, trying to process it. Failing, she just said, "Oh, how could you?"

"Because you're my little sister, and I care about what happens to you." Din replied.

As they were talking, the gate chamber slowly gained more people, most of whom carried satchels or stood with containers of some kind, waiting for transport. Thirty more people besides Fidela and her precious cargo would be making the journey to various bases in Terra today, though only Fi would be traveling on to the underground cavern base.

Soon, a voice announced through speakers with authority, "All travelers, please stand away from the stargate."

As they were already over to the side neither Fi nor Din moved, though they watched as several others cleared the area immediately in front of the gate.

When the path was clear, the same voice announced again, "Establishing wormhole. Destination, Terra."

The next thing the two women knew, the lights around the gate began to circulate until eight constellation symbols, and the seven sapphire chevrons placed equidistant around the circumference of the ring lit up.

_Whoosh!_

A great inverted vortex which resembled a whirlpool of rushing water flew out of the great ring and then immediately drew itself back in again settling into a kind of puddle of blue sparkling energy which covered the previously empty opening of the stargate.

"All travelers, please send all cargo containers through the active stargate." The disembodied voice instructed.

"I guess it's time." Fidela said as she turned and moved to touch each of the containers' control panels.

As she did, each container lifted itself off the floor, buoyed up by an invisible field, and proceeded to direct itself towards the stargate. Around them, other box like containers did the same and soon there was a line of such containers three wide passing through the event horizon of the active wormhole, dematerializing instantly as they crossed it.

"Now we see if all of our hard work remains intact." Din observed as their own containers passed through.

After about ten minutes, when the last container went through, the voice from the control room announced, "All travelers, please proceed through the stargate now."

"I'll see you in a week's time." Din told her sister again, giving her one more embrace. "There will be nothing to worry about, I promise you."

Fi smiled at her, returning the embrace. And then, without another word, she followed her fellow travelers into the field of blue energy, and then disappeared.

Farore sat at her private computer console in the apartment she shared with her ten year old son. It stood towards the top of a residential structure on the western arm of the city. She had lived there in the apartment next door to one of her own best friends growing up, Nayru, since she and her husband, Silvus, had been married some eleven years before. Much of those eleven years had been spent waiting for Silvus to come home on leave from his tours of duty out among the stars until one day, almost two years before, she received the news he wouldn't be coming home at all.

That was the day she had changed her hair color to a deep forest green.

It had been a private joke really, a silly threat she made against Silvus that if he should ever not come home, she would dye her hair green just to spite him. He had loved her long, dark blond hair that she kept tied in twin ponytails off to the sides of her head and she knew it. Farore was a geneticist, and knew the exact sequences of her own genes she would need to engineer to make the change permanent. She always said she wanted her hair to match her eyes and if he didn't come home in time, she might just make it happen permanently.

He didn't come home, and, in her grief, she kept her word.

Farore's own laboratory space had already been packed up and her equipment had been sent through the stargate earlier that morning with Fi. It now stood empty except for a couple of consoles molded into the walls and floor of the chamber. She might have considered working there except that those consoles were tied into the city's public database. They were also heavily watched by Moros and the Atlantean Council. The console in her apartment was far more compact. Fi herself had heavily encrypted it for her so that no one but Farore could hope to access it without destroying the precious data contained therein.

What Moros didn't know about wouldn't hurt him, or her for that matter, and he really didn't need to know about her little "side project". Given his strong objections to her team's main line of research and its goal, her little thought experiment would likely send him over the edge much like his reaction to her baby brother's experiments with time and causality. Poor Janus couldn't even share most of his research publicly anymore without fear of reprisal.

As she ran the simulations through its paces, everything looked very good. The DNA sequences and molecular combinations were working exactly as predicted. She advanced the simulation's development and evolution by millennia under various climactic conditions and saw that they adapted well and even thrived. The new species of intelligent humanoid life was incredibly promising, and she was certain it would solve the initial problem which had started the war to begin with.

When her forbears had relocated the Atlantis city-ship to this galaxy, they had found it devoid of any intelligent life. Feeling that unacceptable, as they had done in the galaxy where Terra was located, they seeded this one as well with human life. Not just content to establish colonies of their own people on worlds naturally capable of supporting their own form of life, they recreated a lesser evolved form of human life on hundreds of worlds throughout and allowed them to develop, for the most part, without interference.

While mostly well intentioned, they had not studied the ecosystems and lifeforms of those habitable planets well enough. By the time they realized their mistake, the Iratus insectoid had already evolved into the Wraith through the absorption of human and Lantean DNA.

It was a mistake she worked to ensure was never repeated.

But it required a manipulation of the base DNA of her own people into an almost entirely new species, one which would be completely resistant to living energy and genetic parasites like the Irati or their Wraith descendents. Furthermore it required that this new species keep the genetic markers and evolutionary changes to their brains which made it possible for them to ascend. It would enable the abilities like healing, foresight, projection and others which her people demonstrated and seemed like miracles and magic to those populations they created.

Moros would have a coronary if he knew what she had been up to, and he would not be the only one. Giving a newly engineered species those abilities right from the start was strictly forbidden. It was considered interference in one of the worst possible ways by the majority of her people. It would have been seen as unecessarily reckless.

But this was not her only "ethical" infraction. In order to achieve her goals, she had used sequences of DNA from the Wraith themselves. To be certain, there was nothing that would cause them to be a threat like the Wraith and she only sought to make use of some of the alien species' more beneficial properties. But still, it would be seen as an abomination.

And to make matters worse, after achieving her goal of total resistance to such parasites, she had pressed on, letting her imagination run wild. She worked to give them enhanced reflexes and physical senses. Their enhanced immune systems and regenerative properties would ensure that susceptibility to disease and cell damage would not threaten their exceptionally long lives. Their evolutionary rate of change would be enhanced as well making them incredibly adaptable to any environment within a very few generations instead of hundreds. She also insisted that they be attractive with high cheekbones and refined, flawless features. With something of an artistic flair she also gave them long, sharply tapered ears that ended in a point to make them obviously distinguishable from standard humans.

They would be the perfect candidates for re-population of those worlds devastated by the Wraith once the war had concluded. They would be her gift to a galaxy that had been decimated by her people's own lack of foresight. They would ensure that no one else would have to lose a loved one to such monsters. They only needed her courage to persevere and bring them to life.

And they would be going with her and her son to Terra. At least, the genetic coding for them would be, stored away in data crystals which she would carry through personally. The two things most precious to her in all of existence; she would keep them both close to her where she could protect them.

"Mother?" A boy's voice asked.

Farore looked up from her console, her eyes a little blurry from staring so long at the display.

"Oh, my dear sweet boy!" Farore responded in surprise, hastily passing her hand over the computer's screen darkening it from sight. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Not long, I just wanted to see how you were doing before I left with Hylia for schooling." Copulus responded.

He looked so much like his father, Silvus. Farore almost couldn't bear to keep looking at him without drawing him in close, but she restrained herself.

"I'm well, Copulus. I was just finishing up some details on a side project. Nothing too exciting." She told him.

"Did you eat breakfast?" Copulus asked, his voice tinged with concern.

Had she? She paused having to think.

"I will, sweet boy. I'll go and make myself something right now." She told him. "Did you eat?" She asked.

"I had some spiced pumpkin pastries with Hylia and Nayru after I woke up." He told her.

"Oh, good. I know you like those." Farore responded. "I love you, Copulus. I'll be here when you and Hylia are done. We need to start packing our personal things for Terra soon."

"Yeah, I know." He said, his eyes still watching her with concern. "Are you sure you're going to be okay today, mother?"

"Yes, of course. What a silly thing to ask! Of course I'm going to be..." She stopped and paused for a minute, taking in the serious, even protective expression on his young face. "I'm fine, sweet boy. I just have a lot on my mind right now, that's all."

"Do you want me to stay with you today?" He asked, unpersuaded.

"No. No, you go and learn your lessons. I know you don't think much of schooling, Copulus, but it's vitally important that you understand the world you live in. Your lessons will be important where we're going." She told him, allowing her more authoritative mother's tone to fill her voice.

He nodded without argument, his eyes still filled with a concern that was far too mature for his ten years. "I'll check on you after we're done, okay?" He said.

_He'll check on me? Since when did he become the parent?_ She thought to herself.

Out loud, she told him, "Go." A half smile creeping across her lips.

As he turned his back towards her, heading for the door to the structure's hallway, Farore watched him go. She didn't understand why he seemed to think _she_ was the one needing looking after at times, but it was sweet of him. She appreciated his concern.

_My precious boy._

In the hallway, Hylia waited for her best friend. She was wearing a practical white tunic and tan pants with a gold trimmed belt. Her light blond hair had been put up into a bun more appropriate for study by her mother that morning.

Copulus had come over to hers and her mother's residence earlier when he knew they would be eating breakfast. Her mother didn't mind, and it wasn't the first time. She had taken to intentionally preparing enough food for Copulus as well as themselves in the mornings.

The door slid open, and the ten year old boy with the reddish blond hair stepped through the opening. He wore a forest green colored tunic over his light tan pants that morning. She knew why he had opted for it, it was his mother's favorite color.

"She didn't eat breakfast again." He told her after the door closed. "She was still staring at the computer display like she was when I got up this morning. She told me to go with you, but I'm worried about her."

"Maybe I should tell my mother. She could talk to her." Hylia offered.

"Maybe." Copulus responded. "I just don't know if I should leave her alone. What if she forgets to eat lunch too?"

"Your mother's a grown-up, Copulus. Grown-ups don't forget things like that." Hylia pointed out.

"She did this when she got the news father wasn't coming home, too." He told her as he started walking for the structure's transporter. "When she changed her hair to green. She wouldn't let me out of her sight, remember? I was scared for her then."

Hylia followed after him down the hallway.

The crimson transporter doors were at the end of the rusted copper colored hallway. It was essentially a lift which transported people within it, not only up and down the height of the structure, but also horizontally across tubes and tunnels which ran the length of the radiating arms of the city. This one would take the two children across the city to Atlantis' education structure.

They might be leaving the city of their birth in less than a week, but that proved to be no excuse for either of them missing their lesson times with the holographic instructor. Learning, it appeared, stopped for no one.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 – A Week Later

The southern polar outpost on Terra felt cramped and small as the new group of travelers emerged through the stargate. Whereas Atlantis's stargate embarkation chamber might have reminded one of a grand ballroom or cathedral, the polar outpost's reception chamber was designed to be functional with few aesthetics. The air of the chamber they emerged into from the stargate felt much colder than the one in which they had embarked from as well.

The chamber appeared to be somewhat spherical, enclosed in walls of white and blue glass upon first inspection. The flooring was a bronzed metal grate laid over a natural granite which felt warm on the soles of the travelers' feet, offsetting the crisp chill in the air. Some ten meters or so away from the stargate, out of the vortex zone, stood a metallic pedestal which seemed to flow upwards from the grate into a kind of fat, tilted mushroom shape the apex of which was pointed away from the newcomers. Glowing rods of bluish white light stood at intervals around the room.

There had been over thirty Lanteans that had departed the city of Atlantis that morning, among them Nayru, Din, and the rest of their project team and families. Some of the travelers chose to clutch bags and satchels, others came through empty handed knowing that their personal belongings had already come through in containers before them.

A man's voice called out as each person came through, "Please move forward, away from the stargate!"

It was only after several minutes upon their emerging through the stargate that those arriving realized that the walls of the cramped chamber weren't glass at all, but solid ice so thick one couldn't see what might lay on the other side of it, if there was another side.

As the travelers looked around to take in their surroundings, they saw tunnels carved into the crystalline walls that appeared to stretch out and away from the stargate chamber. Bronzed conduits ran along the walls of these tunnels out of sight as they traveled through them. Four Lantean personnel in crisp, insulated white and tan uniforms were stationed around the chamber with energy pistols securely holstered to their sides.

One of these persons, a taller man with steel gray hair and strong chiseled features stepped out from behind the pedestal. He had a welcoming smile, but a practical manner about him. To Hylia's mind, he seemed instantly trustworthy as she stood next to her mother.

Hylia's stomach felt nauseous after coming through the stargate, and her heart was racing. It had been her first, and only trip through one and it took a minute for her brain to process the instantaneous change in her surroundings. She had the faintest memory of falling into a field of stars through a sort of rainbow tunnel, but the memory was fading quickly. Next to her and her mother stood Copulus and Farore, both of whom, like her, clutched the handles of traveling satchels.

"Welcome to Terra." The man told the newcomers as the stargate's energy puddle shut down and it became quiet again. "If you will all proceed down the tunnel to your left, we can get you to the gateship launch bay and have you at your final destinations that much sooner."

"Is that ice?" Copulus asked him, blurting out his question before his mother could stop him.

"Good observation, young man. Yes it is. There is at least a good kilometer of ice sitting above and around this outpost. It took the initial return team weeks to tunnel through all of it to create this outpost." The welcoming man smiled at the question. "If you'd like, I can explain why on the way to your gateship. Please, if you'll come with me."

"Okay." Copulus agreed.

The man kept his word as they walked.

"The original outpost was built not long after our own forebears arrived here from the galaxy they originated in, around six million years ago. At the time, this entire world was a lot warmer and this particular continent that we're standing on was farther north. The stargate had been originally positioned outdoors. The outpost was built as a dock for city-ships like Atlantis. The city itself was built here sitting on the open landscape in a much warmer, more temperate climate." He told him, taking on a pedagogical tone of voice as though he might have been a tour guide.

"So how did all this ice get here?" Copulus asked.

The man continued. "Planetary climates don't stay the same over the course of a world's lifespan, young man, and continents don't stay in one place over the course of millions of years. This continent was originally more equatorial when our people found this world. But as it drifted south, it began to freeze over, and ice collected across its surface. By the time Atlantis left this world a million years ago, the ice sheet had almost completely formed. We had to cut through the ice mostly by hand to make sure none of it caved in on top of us. It was a fair amount of work. Then finding and replacing the _potentia,_ reactivating the original docking outpost, bringing in the gateships and making sure the transit tunnels were big enough to bring them through; it took us some time, but we were able to make it reasonably useful again as a way point for the rest of our new colonies on Terra."

"I'm sorry," Nayru interrupted politely, "but did you say 'new colonies'? I was under the impression that Atlantis was only establishing small, discreet bases for scientific research. 'Colony' sounds so much more permanent."

The man pursed his lips, his expression taking on a strained expression as though he was deciding how much to say and still be as honest as possible. Finally he responded, "This outpost has been much more active recently than you might have been led to believe. There are now twenty such sites we've been transferring our people to across the planet."

"But what about the native population of humans?" She asked. "We can't interfere with the course of their natural development."

"All of the sites are well out of view of any of the settlements and nomadic bands we're aware of. We're as discreet as we possibly can be." He replied, obviously feeling somewhat uncomfortable at the questions she was asking. Nayru got the sense that he knew a lot more than he was saying.

"How many of our people have relocated to Terra recently?" Din, who had been behind Nayru and had been quietly listening to the conversation, asked rather bluntly.

"I'm really not at liberty to say." He told her, his eyes darting around the tunnel. "You'll have to ask your own site administrator for the current size of the base. Where are you traveling on to from here?"

"Duo'oni." Nayru answered him, watching his responses intently.

"Oh, yes, the desert cavern. I haven't had the chance to see it myself, but I've heard it is magnificent; a true natural wonder."

"Really? What's so wonderful about a big cave?" Hylia asked him as she walked next to her mother.

"From what I've heard, the ceiling of the cavern is so high off the floor, you can barely see it. The structures of the research base were carved out of the rock by the initial surveyors. It sits like a small town right on the shore of a freshwater lake so massive it's like looking at the sea at twilight." He told her.

"At twilight?" She asked. "Why at twilight?"

"There's a bioluminescent algae that lives in the water that gives off an orange glow. The lake is filled with it, lighting up the whole cavern as though it were a constant sunset or sunrise." He told her.

"So, there's no day night cycle to the cavern?" Farore asked, not looking forward to the prospect.

"The algae have their own thirty five hour biochemical cycle where their light dims for half the time. I understand it takes some getting used to, but it's not impossible." He answered as they came to the end of the tunnel. "And here we are."

The tunnel opened up into a much grander cavern of ice, which felt much colder than the tunnel and the gate chamber had been. There was no ceiling to this cavern, but the walls of it seemed to extend almost forever upward until they fell away revealing many unfamiliar constellations of stars which greeted them across a vast night sky.

"It's beautiful." Hylia said with awe as she stared upwards.

Their guide nodded at the sentiment. "And now I must return to the stargate. I believe gateship three over there is to where you will want to be heading." He told them, gesturing to a vessel some twenty meters away from them before he turned to head back through the tunnel.

As Hylia's eyes came down to follow the man's hand, the exposed cavern itself seemed to expand into a circular field where over a dozen small, cylindrical shuttle vessels sat on the ground. They were each about eight meters long and almost five in diameter. The forward and aft sections of the shuttles were molded at a diagonal to make storing them end to end much easier as well as to improve aerodynamics. They had no wings, but instead had propulsion pods to the sides which retracted into the body of the craft. They were designed to just fit through a stargate in order to transport people and supplies more efficiently to destinations farther away from the receiving gate. The girl had seen gateships many times before going to and from their hanger bay at the top of the central tower in the city, but never this many all at once.

"There are so many." She said out loud.

"How many people can a gateship hold?" Copulus asked, never having been on one before.

"Twenty without cargo." His mother replied as she moved out into the landing field looking at the shuttles, and the empty landing pads in between them. There looked to be about six gateships already out on runs.

Copulus followed his mother's lead as she strode towards the one which their guide had pointed out. The rear access door stood down and open. The rest of their party followed after them across the icy rock field.

Upon arriving they found the passenger compartment and cargo hold had already been halfway filled with the containers containing the group's personal luggage. There was just enough room left for the six of them to sit on the somewhat uncomfortable passenger benches in the rear of the craft.

Hylia took one more look at the stars above her before she also boarded the small shuttle. She wondered briefly if she would ever see any stars again after that day. With sad resignation, she then entered the craft as well and strapped herself into the bench seat next to Nayru.

Sargeras sat next to Din in the gateship as the pilot closed the rear door and prepped for take off through the opening in the ice above them. He had been quiet during the whole conversation between the stargate technician and the others with him, mostly because he knew more about the subject than any of them. He also knew the answers his daughter and her friends were pressing for weren't meant to be public knowledge.

He had been privy to those decisions made by Moros and the Atlantean Council before his retirement. Put simply, with the influx of survivors and refugees from the worlds culled and conquered by the Wraith, Atlantis's own residential units were running out of space quickly.

The city could house upwards of three quarters of a million people at its maximum, and that was stacking people on top of each other. After a million years of occupation in that galaxy, there had been Lantean colonies across many worlds that could easily boast numbers in the millions. As the refugees from their colonies began to trickle in over the last several years, space in the city had filled up quickly. They had established connection with the Terran stargate with an eye to return to the world of the city's origin and investigate it for a possible relocation site for their excess population and, if necessary, an evacuation route for the rest of the city.

They hadn't expected to find a second evolution of their own kind waiting for them when they dug through the ice to survey the world. It had complicated matters, but it was an obstacle they could work around, and they did, finding every possible isolated location they could to keep away from the native populations.

As the war with the Wraith had dragged on increasingly against their favor, it became more and more evident to the Council that re-establishing more permanent settlements on Terra might be the only way for their people to survive. But, they didn't want to create any more of a panic than the Wraith had already done. Starting with the refugees, they sent small groups through at a time to add to the research teams and carry more equipment with them for the new settlements. Sargeras was no longer privy to exactly how many people had been transferred to Terra over the past few years, but he knew it was no small number.

There had been some discussion of just launching Atlantis back through hyperspace to Terra. But there were still too many of their own people and ships in the galaxy that would need the ancestral city to coordinate them. The other argument against this plan was they didn't want to lead the Wraith to Terra and lose the safe refuge that it was becoming. This was the argument which swayed the council to leave the million year old city-ship right where it was on the surface of Lantea's ocean for the time being.

Sargeras turned his head towards the opening where the pilots controlled the gate ship. He hadn't felt it, but the view from the forward window had already changed from the walls of thick ice glacier to the night sky that Nayru's daughter had found so entrancing.

He didn't know his daughter's colleagues as well as he should have, he decided. The boy who sat across from him and his green haired mother seemed a strong and active boy with bright curious eyes. The boy leaned as far forward as he could to try and see what he could of the view from where he sat. Sargeras smiled at his attempt.

"Your first time on a gateship, son?" He asked him.

"Yes, sir." The boy replied. "I just wish there were more windows. I want to see everything I can."

"Wait just a minute." The old man replied.

Sargeras then unbuckled his own straps and made his way forward to the cockpit where the pilots sat. The co-pilot, realizing one of the passengers was standing behind him turned his seat around.

"Sir, you really need to..." He began to say.

Sargeras held up a hand and stopped him. "Do you know who I am, son?"

"General Sargeras, sir." The co-pilot replied, taking a more respectful tone. "I apologize. We're just not supposed to have passengers up here."

"Fair enough, lieutenant. I won't be long. There's a young man back there, a girl too, who've never been in one of these before. I was just wondering if you could make an exception and let them see the view out the window for a little while." Sargeras told him. "I'm sure they'd keep out of the way. It's not like they're going to have a lot of chances to see this kind of scenery where we're headed."

The co-pilot looked back towards where the passengers were seated. He then looked towards the pilot who himself didn't know what to say to the famous military man that made the request.

"I suppose it wouldn't hurt anything." The co-pilot finally replied.

"Thank you, gentlemen." The old general told them, and then, turning around, pointed towards the boy and the girl and waved them up to the cockpit.

The boy's eyes lit up and without waiting for his mother, he unstrapped himself and rushed up to where Sargeras stood. The girl looked uncertainly to her mother first who nodded her approval. She then also unstrapped herself and joined her friend.

"Now," the old general told them, "these gentlemen have said as long as you keep out of the way, you can watch the forward view from here."

"Thank you, sir!" The boy replied.

Sargeras chuckled. "What's your name, son?"

"Copulus, and this is Hylia." The boy replied to him.

Copulus then looked at Sargeras as though studying him. It was then a look of recognition and not a little awe filled the boy's expression.

"You're General Demise aren't you?" He then asked, his own voice taking on a tone approaching awe.

Sargeras grimaced, but then forced himself to smile. "That's a nickname some of the men under my command gave me a long time ago. I usually go by Sargeras."

In truth, he hated the nickname.

"I've read about all of your battles and strategies. You were a genius!" The boy continued enthusiastically.

"I wish that were true." Sargeras replied. Then, patting Copulus on the shoulder, he told him, "Enjoy the view, both of you."

He then went to go rejoin his daughter in the back, strapping himself back in for the rest of the ride. As he settled down next to Din. She leaned her head closer to his and said, "That was a nice thing you did for them, father."

"They won't cause too much trouble. Where we're going, they're not going to get to see much of this for a long time." He replied. "Besides, neither you nor your sister ever gave me grandchildren. Who else am I supposed to dote on?"

Din smiled, though it was somewhat pained. There had been reasons for why she never married or had children. But she was getting to the age where she felt the lack of children most keenly.

"It's just as well that you didn't." Sargeras continued, regret in his voice. "I couldn't have been there for them anyway."

Din had no response to that. It was true enough as it was.

The gateship rose high into the night sky over the antarctic surface, speeding from the landing cavern in the ice until the bluish tinge of atmosphere fell away and there was nothing to obstruct the light of the stars. The surface of the world underneath them seemed to be entirely encompassed by the blue of ocean and the white of ice and snow from their position.

"There's so much ocean!" Hylia exclaimed with some delight.

The pilot sitting in front of her smiled.

He then replied to her, "Not as much as Lantea, but at least seventy percent of the planet is covered in water. There's been so many changes to this world since our people left before that all of the information in the database on Terra is almost completely obsolete. It's been like surveying a whole new world."

"Oh, I wish we'd be able to see more of it." Hylia then said.

"I wouldn't worry about that too much." The co-pilot responded to her. "You've got a lot of years ahead of you. I'm sure you're both going to do some amazing things and see a lot more than we will."

The view in the forward screen dipped back towards the planet's surface as the gateship angled towards a more northern continent from low orbit. Then the surface of the planet began to rush up to meet them as the small craft re-entered the atmosphere covering thousands of kilometers in mere minutes. The gateship sped through the sky towards its destination.

Ocean, and then rainforest sped by underneath them. This was followed by the gritty tans, greens and browns of desert scrub and mountains. The dry desert continued on unrelenting. Little bits of green streaked by here and there, but the landscape was dominated by dry beds of rock and sand.

The gateship continued on until another small mountain came into view. It seemed to be almost out of place in the flat plain the vessel skimmed over. A great mound of rock, sparsely covered by green brush, creating in a wide jagged caldera.

The pilot slowed the gateship's velocity and circled the lonely mountain. He then spoke aloud into the air, "Gateship Three to Duo'oni hanger requesting hanger location and admission."

A translucent orange and red image of sliding doors came up in front of the pilot and was overlaid in three dimensions over the image of the landscape in front of them. The pilot then diverted the gateship towards where the image indicated the doors should be.

The co-pilot then turned to the two children and said, "I need you two to strap back in now while we land, okay?"

Both Copulus and Hylia then nodded and returned to their bench seats next to their mothers. Copulus looked at Sargeras and smiled. Sargeras winked at him in return.

"There'll be more new sights to see, boy. You just wait." The old man told him.

As the gateship approached, a bare patch of ground cracked slowly open. Dirt and rock fell into the opening as it grew wider and wider until it was possible to fit the small vessel through it. The gateship then made its descent, decelerating quickly and coming to hover just over the opening and retracting its flight pods into its cylindrical body. It then dropped through the opening in the desert floor into a large underground chamber just big enough for two such vessels to rest comfortable side by side.

The gateship then moved slowly within the chamber until it hovered directly over a metal grated section of floor and touched down. The vessel continued to hum with power for a few more minutes until the pilot seemed satisfied, and then it shut down. The rear door seemed then to open on its own.

"We've arrived." The pilot announced unceremoniously. "Take your containers and exit the gateship. We've only got another hour before we have to return to the stargate outpost."

The passengers unstrapped themselves and, following instructions, exited the gateship. As they did, the night sky overhead through the opening in the ceiling, just beginning to turn purple and orange with the impending dawn, started to recede from view as the twin hanger doors slid closed.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3 – Seven Years Later

The stone carved dock was quiet that evening. Most of the ever growing settlement's inhabitants had retired to their own dwellings in the expanding cavern town by that point in the dimming period of the thirty hour light cycle that permeated the expansive underground world.

The young woman with blond hair and royal blue eyes, dressed in white and tan lab clothing, looked up into the darkness of the cavern towards the ceiling which was just out of sight. After so many years now it had only become a silly reflex. Hylia hadn't actually expected to see the celestial lights she had known earlier in her life. Though, that evening, a sense of loss was welling up within her that had been dormant for a long time. Her eyes then diverted back to the dimly glowing waters of the cavern's freshwater lake.

She was alone sitting on the end of the dock. It had been a long, but fruitful day working in her mother's lab, and she was exhausted from the mental and emotional toll it had taken on her. The silence and stillness of the cavern's naturally luminescent waters were welcome tonight.

When she had first seen the lake glowing with it's own twilight, she could almost pretend the waters were magic. Of course she knew that magic, real magic, didn't exist except in ancient or aboriginal myths, but it felt comforting nonetheless to think of them that way. That evening she hoped to allow their calming "spell" to work on her spirit as she closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing.

_One breath in. One breath out._ She counted. She did not control her breaths but allowed them to flow evenly and naturally and merely observed them.

She practiced the breathing meditation regularly now, observing her breaths and her thoughts as they came. She moved her focus from her breath to various points of her body working to relax them and let go. It surprised her how tense the experiment had made her, and how much she had invested emotionally in it.

She had taken on the role of her mother's research assistant only two years before, and somewhat under protest. She had hoped to return to Atlantis to complete her formal education, but her mother had wanted her to stay close. As a means of continuing her education, Nayru had brought her in to be an assistant to their research project which had made enormous progress since leaving the Council's intrusive and ever watchful eye.

Tonight had been one of the fruits of that research.

Another man who had not traveled with them, but was a more recent member of the Lantean colony by the name of Yen Sid had willingly allowed his own research, with which he had hit a wall on his own, to be absorbed into the larger project. His own subject of research had been the stargate and the wormhole "portals" as he called them. Though he worked mostly with Din, he also collaborated freely with her mother and Farore.

His primary research had concerned the novel use of the thirty seven coordinate symbols on a stargate as a writing system. He had found use of them as such in the Atlantis database from prior to the city-ship's original departure from Terra hundreds of millennia ago. Yen Sid's hypothesis had been that by using the stargate symbols in a more elaborate manner to describe not just the specific point in space that you wanted to make the connection to, but the specific universe and world within that universe within the infinite multiverse one might literally form a "link" to any world one could imagine. As long as the world could physically exist somewhere in the infinite dimensional permutations of space, time, and causality, then a portal could be opened to it provided that the description was accurate enough.

Of course, he was mostly laughed at back home.

Like her mother and their friends, he chose to take his own research away from prying and critical eyes. Upon meeting their own small group of close friends and family he immediately found kindred spirits. It became quickly evident that the subject of their own research, the link between belief and reality and how one might affect the other, was immediately complimentary to his own work.

And this evening his belief in that work became a reality, a victory against those who scorned them that they all could share in.

This evening, a link was made to a world through the written description of that world alone.

Of course it had taken the better part of the last year to establish what would be needed. The naquida based ink, the molecularly threaded "paper", and the power source needed to create the portal. And then there was the question of what would be needed in the description of the world.

Many previous experiments had been tried before. All of them small. They had been successful in establishing links to unstable and rudimentary worlds in order to show a proof of concept, but tonight's experiment had been far grander in scale. Tonight, rather than just a page or two of description, they had completed enough written description to fill a book.

It was precisely the three specialties of her mother, Din, and Farore that came into play as each wrote in the components for a stable, sustainable physical world to connect to. What was also important in the writing in terms of the experiment was the role belief and imagination played in it. For this, Yen Sid had also shared in writing a part of the description. Hylia herself had been allowed to input lines as well in the description of the world. She had even been encouraged to use her imagination and attempt to write abstract concepts into the world.

Her contributions had involved the abstract concepts of love and heroism. As she thought back to it, she chastised herself for being too silly and romantic, but the project leaders felt that those lines would work well for their purposes. For their parts, in addition to their more practical contributions regarding land, oceans, and lifeforms, Nayru had also contributed lines about wisdom, Farore courage, and Din power.

In the end, the book grew to several hundred pages of script when the description was eventually transferred by hand into the specially prepared pages of the book. In the interests of making the world stable, many lines were repeated several times using different wording. Hylia herself had carefully transcribed every symbol with nothing more technological than a simple writing pen, and a specially prepared ink. There were no chapter divisions per se, and in reality the text read something like the continuous code of one of Fidela's programs. It had taken her the past two weeks of long, long writing sessions in order to transcribe it all.

But amazingly, when the book was finally powered, the inside back panel of the book lit up with a flyby image of a beautiful world teeming with green, almost glowing vegetation, mountains, lakes, and gorgeous vistas emerged. The link had been established and the world appeared stable.

There now remained but one experiment left, and that was to send an object through the portal created by the descriptive Book and see if it could be seen through the portal window. If this was to be successful then the next step would be to send a person through, though not without a way back. Until they developed a "return" linking book, it would be a one way trip.

Hylia opened her eyes. The excitement of the day's success wouldn't allow her to continue as her awareness continuously came back to that moment when she saw the image of the world. It had been night in that world, and in addition to all the natural, almost "magical" beauty of it, she saw the bright, blinking lights of stars and a single full moon. Beyond the mountains of the world's image she had also seen something, just a glimpse for a brief moment, that her heart had ached for. It was a vast blue sea. It had only been for a few moments, but she had seen it, and she was forcefully reminded of how long it had been since she had seen anything but the lake, rock, and stone walls of the Duo'oni cavern.

She missed Lantea.

A single tear formed in her eye and fell down her cheek as she sat, back erect, cross legged at the end of the dock.

"Am I disturbing anything?" A very familiar, male voice asked.

Surprised, Hylia looked up and turned her head around to see the form of a young man with a well muscled, athletic build. He had reddish blond hair and forest green eyes. He was wearing the tan uniform trousers and jacket of Duo'oni's security personnel.

Hylia reached up with her slender, feminine left hand to take his. She smiled, but the tears in her eyes were building more and more. She said nothing but continued to smile at him.

Copulus sat down next to her on the carved stone and dangled his booted feet over the edge. He still held her hand in his.

"The experiment didn't go well, I take it?" He asked.

She laughed, and wiped her eyes.

"No, the experiment was a success." She told him. "We did it. We created a portal to a world we only imagined together before."

"Wow." Was all he could say for a few minutes as he allowed the import of her statement to sink in. When he gave up trying to wrap his mind around it, he asked, giving her hand a gentle squeeze, "So why the tears?"

They began to flow more freely, "Oh Copulus, I saw the ocean! I saw stars! I saw mountains, and forests, and open sky in the book's panel! It was… It was..."

Words failed her as she tried to describe it.

"Beautiful." He finished for her. "Like home."

"Yes." She replied. "Like home. Remember that time our mothers took us to the settlements on the continent? Remember the snow capped mountains and the woods? It looked just like that! I didn't realize how much I missed home until tonight."

He scooted closer to her. Placing her hand in his other hand, he gently leaned in and allowed her to put her head against his shoulder.

"I miss home too." He told her. "But we can't go back. Not now at any rate."

"Why can't we?" She asked him. "Why won't they let us return? They wouldn't let you return for combat training either. Sargeras had to take it upon himself to teach you and the other new officers edged weapons personally instead of the blade masters back home."

Copulus went silent for some time after her question. Long enough for her to know something was up.

"What is it?" She asked. "You know something, don't you?"

"I'm not supposed to say anything." He told her. "Not to anyone."

"Copulus, we've been friends for as long as either of us can remember." Hylia chastised him.

"We've been more than that." Copulus smiled.

"Exactly! What is it that you can't tell me?" She demanded.

Copulus lowered his voice, and motioned for her to lower hers.

"What I can't tell you is that the war against the Wraith has gone badly and we've lost all of our colonies. So badly that no one is allowed to return to Atlantis and haven't been for the last three years because it's been under seige by the Wraith. And I can't tell you that Atlantis has been evacuating the city to all of Terra's colonies and settlements for at least that long. I also can't tell you that they've activated the shield and submerged the city under the ocean to dampen the effects the Wraith weapons are having on the shield." Copulus told her.

Hylia's eyes went wide. She was speechless.

_How could this have happened?_

"The Council is holding out as long as they can for the remaining refugee ships, but the plan now is to leave the city sleeping and hopefully return in the future." He told her quietly, so no one would overhear.

"There are over half a million people living in the city." She said. "They'd have to relocate all of them to Terra."

Copulus shook his head, "No, there haven't been that many people in the city since we lived there. And those who have been relocated have been dispersed to all of the colonies around the planet to keep our footprint small and unnoticed by the native humans. The city's population is down to only a few thousand now. General Sargeras has been kept informed regularly by the Council. As his attache, I'm kept informed too."

"So, no matter what, we can't go home, can we?" She realized sadly.

He put his arm around her and told her honestly, "No. No, we can't."

A sense of loss rose up within her that was deep and painful. Since their transit to Terra seven years prior, Hylia had always assumed that the both of them would be returning to the world of their birth. It had been the hope that had sustained her throughout their residence in the Duo'oni cavern. In one moment, that hope had been obliterated.

Tears flowed more freely now and Copulus turned to hold her closer as she wept into his shoulder.

"We can still make a life here, Hylia." He tried to comfort her. "The cavern isn't so bad."

"It's a tomb." She responded as she wept. "I… I wanted to breathe fresh air again and feel the breeze on my face. I can't stay in this place for the rest of my life, I just can't."

Copulus didn't know how to respond. There was a whole world up above them that he had seen on a fairly regular basis flying the gateships back and forth to the antarctic base to receive reports and transmit data for backup in Atlantis's computer database. It was a world of oceans, forests, and deserts that would be more than enough to satisfy his dearest love, but their access to it was also strictly controlled. They could not _reside _there. None of them would risk contaminating the native human population above them. It was their highest ethical principle.

He stroked the back of her head gently with his own hand, feeling lost himself.

Then in an offhand comment that was meant as a kind of jest to get her to smile he whispered to her, "Maybe one day we could see the world you linked to in the book. Maybe we could live there instead."

But the idea took root in Hylia's mind and heart as her tears began to recede and her scientist's mind began to work on the problem. "Maybe we can." She replied to him without the slightest trace of jest in her voice.

Two weeks later, Hylia and Copulus materialized on thick tufts of green grass in a field spread out over a great plateau under a bright blue sky. The grass was interspersed with flowers of white and blue. The sun was warm and friendly overhead. To the north in the far distance could be seen majestic snow capped mountains, though the tallest of them looked to be glowing red with fresh magma. To the southeast, a dense forest appeared along with large lakes and a river system tha ran throughout. To the southwest, there was a deep desert.

Hylia's eyes became wet with tears upon the first sight of the vistas that met them. "I can't believe it." She whispered. "It's real. We're really here."

The return book had been finished. It was densely packed with descriptions and information relating to Terra itself and the cavern in particular as a return point, hand written in the thirty seven symbol script of the stargate coordinates. When it had been powered up, it showed the inside of the Duo'oni cavern close to the docks overlook the underground sea just as had been predicted. Everything was ready for their first attempt at transit.

Hylia had volunteered to be the first one to go, and Copulus had received permission to go with her as her protection in the event there was something dangerous they hadn't predicted. The retired general had already known something of his daughter's experiments, and had finally been brought into the loop when Din had come to him requesting his attache be Nayru's daughter's escort.

"I've no objections." Had been the old soldier's response. "It only makes sense, and he's one of the finest fighters I've ever trained. She'll be in good hands, and I know he'll keep her safe."

Copulus now stood next to her in his white gray security uniform taking in the sights. He felt speechless at the seemingly endless wild and untamed land around him. Like Hylia, he hadn't really been under the open sky for years, or breathed in the fresh atmosphere instead of the filtered, recirculated air of the cavern or of a gateship's interior. It was invigorating and enlivening to him.

Hylia turned around slowly in circles again and again to try and take in as much as possible. "It's… It's beautiful! All of it! And it's exactly as we wrote it, Copulus!"

"Really?" he finally responded, finding his voice. "Everything? How can you be sure?"

"I'm sure. I copied out the coding by hand for the book myself. Oh! Would you just look at it! The others have to come and see it!" she continued.

"Yeah, as soon as we make sure it's completely safe." he responded, a tone of caution in his voice. "It's a new world, and there are protocols for newly established..."

"But we already know everything that's here! We wrote it!" she answered him. "Don't you know what this means? We don't have to live in the cavern anymore! We can bring everyone here! All of us! And we can establish farms, and more research stations, and mining, and manufacturing centers! And if this world doesn't have something we need, we can write links to others that do!"

He put his hand gently on her arm. "Slow down, Hylia. One step at a time. We need to link back now and let the others know it works and the world appears viable."

She turned to face him, her blue eyes almost pleading, "Please. Just a few more minutes. I've waited for this for seven years. Just a few more minutes, Copulus, please. I haven't even seen the ocean yet. I know mother wrote one..."

"A few more minutes." The young man told her. "But if there's an ocean here, it's got to be pretty far from where we're at. I can't even smell salt on the air, just the scent of the grasses and those trees in the distance."

"I know." She replied, looking into the distance. She then said, "We won't have to be as careful either. We know there aren't any native inhabitants here, none intelligent anyway."

"How can you be so sure?" He questioned. "I'm not a scientist, but the conditions look ripe for native life to arise on its own from what I remember from our schooling."

"Because we didn't describe it in the book. Any lifeforms that arise here will be those we choose to seed. Farore has already been working on the genomes for new species to introduce, even a new breed of of adaptable human she wants to start trials with." She replied.

"She has?" That was news to Copulus. His mother hadn't told him anything about it.

"You haven't talked with her much recently, have you?" Hylia asked him.

"Well, I..." In truth, he hadn't talked with his mother much at all since taking on the responsibilities he had under Sargeras. He'd been busy with combat training, flying the gateships back and forth, and being the retired general's personal assistant. "I haven't had much time."

"You find the time to spend with me." she pointed out.

"I make the time to spend with you, Hylia. Truth is, I wouldn't know what to do without you. But mother's hard to read or even understand some times, and she doesn't really open up to me." he responded.

"She asks me about you all the time." Hylia told him as she turned back to meet his eyes. "She knows you talk to me more than her. I think she misses you more than you realize."

Copulus silently considered this. "I'll try and see her more. I promise." he finally responded. "But first we need to link back and let them know everything checks out."

"But we'll come back. I know we will I feel such a connection to this world. I don't know why, but I do." Hylia said.

"Yeah, strange as it is, I do too. Like we're meant to be here somehow." Copulus replied.


End file.
